An examination of Elon Musk’s appearance at the AfD rally, and a reflection on the ties of that party to Nazi Germany.
Excerpt
“Elon Musk told members of the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party that ‘there's too much focus on past guilt,’ days after he gave what scholars and rights groups said was a Hitlergruß, or Nazi salute,” Russell Contreras recently wrote on Axios.
Musk spoke virtually on a big screen at a January 25 AfD rally. Because he is one of Donald Trump's closest advisors, his appearance seemed to imply that the president was backing the party in next month’s snap elections called after the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition.
Maybe the South African-born Musk, said to be the world’s richest man, doesn't know it, or maybe he wouldn’t care if he did: approximately 250,000 Americans (and more than 7,000 South Africans) died fighting Hitler and his junior partner, Benito Mussolini, in World War II.
The sweep of history is replete with irony. January marked the 80th anniversary of two milestones in the world's bloodiest and destructive conflict: American victory in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps where a million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered simply because they were Jewish.
